Donald David Dillbeck, 59 years old and sentenced to death for a murder committed in 1990, years after killing a police officer, will become on Thursday the 100th person executed in Florida since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976.
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His is the first scheduled execution in Florida since 2019, a year in which two were carried out. The covid-19 pandemic also paralyzed executions.
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The Florida Supreme Court rejected last week to stay Dillbeck’s execution and his lawyers announced then that they would file an appeal before the federal Supreme Court, which also denied the request, according to what appears on its website on Wednesday.
Attorney Baya Harrison III alleges that Dillbeck suffers from a neural disorder resulting from prenatal alcohol exposure, known by the acronym ND-PAE.
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He was sentenced to life in prison in 1979 for the shooting murder of a police officer and in 1994 to capital punishment for the stabbing death of a woman whose car he stole in the parking lot of a shopping mall in Tallahassee, the capital of the United States. state, in 1990.
Dillbeck, who had escaped from a jail serving a life sentence for killing the police officer, was arrested shortly after crashing the stolen vehicle.
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In the 1990 murder trial, he was sentenced to die by lethal injection with 8 of the 12 jurors voting in favor. The other four voted for a life sentence.
Currently, for a judge to sentence a defendant to death in Florida, a unanimous vote of the jury is required, as established by the US Supreme Court, which considers sentencing by simple majority unconstitutional.
The unanimity requirement is something that the governor of Florida, Republican Ron DeSantis, wants to change, as he announced in 2022 after the confessed perpetrator of the shooting that killed 17 people at a Parkland (Florida) high school in 2018, Nikolas Cruz, will get rid of capital punishment for that reason.
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There are already bills in both houses of the Florida Congress, dominated by the Republican Party, to make the change requested by DeSantis, who was asked in a letter by the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops not to sign the authorization to execute Dillbeck , but he did it last January.
In the letter, the bishops stressed that punishing with the death penalty “should be inadmissible”.
US President Joe Biden applied a moratorium on federal executions in 2021, after his predecessor, Donald Trump, resumed them during his presidential term.
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According to data from the Florida Department of Corrections (Prisons), there are currently 299 prisoners on “death row,” as the place where those to be executed are known.
The oldest prisoner is Ecuadorian Nelson Serrano, 80, who was convicted of three murders that, to this day, today he assures that he did not commit and whose case is seen by human rights organizations as a judicial outrage.
The Tampa Bay newspaper published a story about Dillbeck’s life in which he recounts that he had been in foster care since he was 4 years old and began using drugs at 13.
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In addition, he recounts the hardships he went through when he was imprisoned with adults at the age of 15, from sexual abuse to violence, and stresses that in the 1994 trial several doctors testified who indicated that he showed signs of mental problems associated with schizophrenia.
EFE
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